Why am I having DNS problems going through Network Solutions DNS to Amazon AWS?

Question

Network Solutions appears to have an issue with AWS hostnames. This AWS ELB has been out there for months and is resolvable from every major DNS provider but network solutions. Any idea as to why?

WORKING (4.2.2.2 DNS)

$ nslookup testloadbalancer-1761726467.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com
Server:     4.2.2.5
Address:    4.2.2.5#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   testloadbalancer-1761726467.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com
Address: 50.112.251.201

NOT WORKING (Network Solutions DNS)

$ nslookup testloadbalancer-1761726467.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com ns1.worldnic.com
Server:     ns1.worldnic.com
Address:    205.178.190.1#53

** server can't find testloadbalancer-1761726467.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com.localhost: SERVFAIL

Answer 1

Is ns1.worldnic.com meant to be an open resolver like level3's 4.2.2.2 or Google's or OpenDNS'? It is not returning any record likely because it is not authoritative for the us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. zone. Are you hosting some other zone with Network Solutions that has a CNAME to the ELB record?

It's also returning SERVFAIL which is odd. I suspect ns1.worldnic.com is not standards compliant, but it's hard to tell without probing more.

Answer 2

Any idea as to why?

To get more details about this DNS server you may test it (and many other ones) with NameBench

From the test result you'll be able to decide what to do...